With 36 albums released in the past 47 years, Chicago certainly has a long — and successful — musical history.

But these days the group is most is in the “Now.”

That would be “Now Chicago XXXVI,” the brass-driven rock group’s latest album, which came out July 4. Normally, Chicago would have stuck with the simple Roman numeral title as it’s done since 1969, but “Now” was chosen for this project to send an explicit message, says to singer-keyboardist Robert Lamm.

“There’s a lot of reasons,” explains Lamm, 69, one of four co-founders left in the nine-piece band, which was one of rock’s first to use a full-time horn section. “I think that there are many people who, whether they like Chicago or don’t like Chicago, assume that what Chicago does is all what you hear on classic rock radio, or that Chicago is some dinosaurlike presence on the tour circuit.

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“And we just wanted to kind of change that perception if we could, by suggesting ‘Now.’”

The album was certainly recorded in a contemporary environment. Since, as Lamm notes, “nobody lives in the same town anymore,” he and trumpeter Lee Loughnane came up with a solution — taking the studio to the musicians — or, rather, on the road with the band when everyone was together. The Rig, as it was dubbed, allowed Chicago to work on new material in hotels and backstage dressing rooms, uploading parts online to coordinating producer Hank Linderman via a private Internet portal, which also allowed the individual musicians to work on their parts remotely.

“The initial idea was to have a platform that we could record and release original music from,” explains Loughnane, 67, “That’s why I put the recording equipment together, so that we could do that while we were out traveling around the country or the world. We approached it as just writing music. We had no specific idea as to what we was going to be the final outcome or how the songs were going to fit together. We were just writing.”

Lamm adds that, “We sort of agreed that this was not going to be an album.”

“This was just going to be recording the songs we want to record in the way we want to record them, not thinking about radio, not thinking about an album and just occasionally maybe dribble them out for people who are interested. And then, when it was least expected, we got an offer from a record company (Frontiers Records) to release it. So we scrambled to try to put together something that resembled a finished album.”

Lamm says there were initially “some complaints from some of the guys” about recording and touring in one fell swoop. “There was some, ‘Hey man, I need a day off!. I gotta rest my chops!’ But we got it done,” he says with a chuckle. “It was just a matter of deciding we were going to do this or not do it, and after a while even the more hesitant guys kind of jumped in and started having fun, really, by listening to the results and listening to the rough mixes and things like that.

“It just took doing it to remember just how fun it was to just do something without having any expectations, kind of like a band that was starting out.”

Loughnane says the mobile recording process “is something we plan on continuing to do from here on out.” And Lamm is confident the expansive, musically sophisticated songs on “Now Chicago XXXVI” will ring true to fans who jumped on board during the group’s earlier, more progressive days.

“When we were done, our manager heard the master (tape) and he said, ‘These songs are so long!’” Lamm recalls with a laugh. “And we said, ‘Well, yeah...’ That was part of what we wanted to do was not necessarily do three-minute songs. We wanted to stretch out a bit.

“And he said, ‘Well, this stuff is not gonna get played on radio,’ and, again, that’s not the point. The point was to write it and record it and be Chicago, which is what we did.”